[RustyShackleford]

Not exactly a woodworking question, but interesting enough, and close enough, I hope, to be tolerated ...

My girlfriend has an old antique-style mirror that is mounted in a wood and chrome frame, so that the whole thing is 7/8" thick. It is currently hung like a picture frame (with eyelets and wire, and a wall hook) but I'm afraid it's gonna fall (the flimsy frame coming apart, or being bumped off the hook) ruining the thing and maybe cutting somebody's foot badly.

So I'd like to mount it like a standard mirror, with two little brackets at the top and two at the bottom. Problem is, those things are invariably designed for mirrors that are 1/8" or 1/4" thick. So I though of using some sort of stand-offs that are 3/4" thick or so, and putting the brackets on them. But most of the brackets have the mounting screw BEHIND the mirror, so the standoffs wouldn't help. But I found these:

... that look like they might do the trick. So I'm imagining making two strips of wood, slightly shorter than the width of the mirror, about 3/4" thick, with all the corners very rounded and painted the wall color. They would be screwed into studs and be tight against the top and bottom of the mirror frame. Then the round clips would be screwed into these wood strips. My main concern is that the wood screw on the clips might be so near the edge of my wooden strips that there's not enough wood for them to get a good bite. I guess I could use longer screws and have them go all the way through the wood strip into the wall (where I'd probably need drywall anchors, so the whole assembly gets kinda complicated).

So I'm asking:

1. Does my idea seem reasonable ?
2. Is there a better way to do this ?
3. Does anyone know of clips actually designed for such a thick item ?

Thanks !

 

[RustyShackleford]

Thanks, I thought about doing something like this, but would prefer not to have the wooden tabs sticking up over the frame - they'd need to be fairly wide since it's wood. Maybe I could just go with my plan of wooden strips above and below the frame, with the face of those strips maybe 1/16" or so proud of the face of the frame. Then just get 4 little tabs of some kind - maybe pieces of plexiglass perhaps 1/2" by 1"- and screw one end of each to the wooden strips with the other end sticking up over the edge of the frame to hold it in place. Then I could just rotate the tabs 90-degrees out of the way to place the frame into position, and then simply rotate them back to hold the frame in place - very much like some picture frames do it.